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This is from the AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW (March 23).
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One in 10 critical systems will fail in hospitals and health care organisations because of a sluggish response to the year 2000 computer bug.
A survey by industry analyst Gartner Group found that 60 per cent of hospitals and health care organisations had not even started to deal with the Y2K issue, while the remainder were at the stage of developing awareness, gathering information and starting to generate a systems' inventory.
The international survey of preparation for the year 2000 bug across 2,400 organisations in 17 countries reported that the "results across industries are shocking . . . for health care organisations the results are even worse".
It failed to find a single organisation that had a detailed plan, or had allotted resources to deal with the problem. . . .
"Health care has one of the highest incidences of embedded systems across industries. These embedded systems -- such as medical equipment, security and alarm systems -- can harbour the year 2000 bug in their microcode. Remediation can be especially difficult in cases where inventories of equipment are out-of-date, the equipment is old, or the original manufacturer is no longer in business."
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